Authority & Mentions · 6 min read · September 24, 2026 · Hafsa Tariq, gaash.ai
Documenting reference projects so they count as evidence, not just photos
A reference project is the best evidence a trade or a firm has, and a photo gallery states almost none of it. An assistant reading your page receives the file name, the alt text and the words around the picture, not the kitchen or the roof. Write each project up in text: what the job was, where and when, how big, what was hard about it, who did it and what came of it. Then the evidence is something an answer can repeat.
Why a gallery proves less than it shows
A buyer's question names the job, and often the material and the place: a walnut kitchen in a particular suburb, a flat roof replaced on a school, a brand refresh for a regional bank. To answer it from your site, a sentence on a page has to say that you did that job. A grid of photographs says it to a person who looks and to nothing that reads. The picture carries no text, the file name is usually a camera's number, and a gallery drawn by a script may not reach a crawler at all.
Our audit of 9,483 small business websites counted the general versions of that problem: 3.0% of the sites delivered their content only through JavaScript, which a crawler that runs no scripts receives as an empty page, and 2.1% kept their real content in a PDF, which is where many portfolios live. 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind. The pages were seldom short; they were missing the facts in text.
What a project write-up states
| Field | What to write | Example |
|---|---|---|
| The job | What was done, in the words a buyer would use for it | Fitted kitchen in [wood], with a [feature] |
| Where | The town or neighborhood, never a private home's address | In [neighborhood], [town] |
| When | The month and year the work was finished | Completed [month year] |
| Size and scope | Measurements, rooms, area or quantities, and what was in and out of scope | [length] of cabinets, [number] units, plumbing by others |
| Materials and methods | What it was made with or how it was done, where a buyer would care | [material], [joint or finish], [method] |
| What was hard | The constraint that made the job worth describing | An out-of-square wall, a listed building, a week's deadline |
| Who did it | The people on your side, by name or role | [name], lead; [name], finishing |
| How long | From start on site, or from brief, to handover | [number] weeks on site |
| What came of it | The result in facts, not adjectives | Handed over on [date]; [what the client could now do] |
| The client's words | A real quote, only with permission, attributed as the client agreed | "[quote]", [first name or role], [town] |
Two or three short paragraphs carry all of it, with the job and the place in the first sentence. That first sentence is the one an answer would lift, so make it true on its own: "[Business name] built a [wood] fitted kitchen in [neighborhood] in [month year]" names the business, the job, the place and the date, which is what citability asks of a passage.
Permission and privacy
- Ask the client before a project goes on the site, and keep the answer in writing.
- Name the neighborhood or town, never a house number, and leave out anything that would identify a private home.
- Keep faces and personal belongings out of the photos, or ask first.
- Name a business client only with its written permission; otherwise describe it by type and place, such as "a regional logistics company in [town]".
- Quote a client only in words they wrote or approved. A paraphrase presented as a quote is invented evidence.
Where a project is confidential, the write-up can still say what kind of problem it was, how you approached it and what changed, in terms nobody could trace to the client. A careful anonymous case says more than a logo wall with nothing under it.
Photos that say what they show
Put a caption in visible text under each photo that says what it shows: the room, the detail, the stage of the work. Give each image alt text written for someone who cannot see it, and a file name that says what it is. A before-and-after pair needs both dates. Keep the photos on your own page rather than only in a social feed embedded by a script, which carries none of your captions to anything that reads the page.
The PDF trap covers what a fetcher receives from files and images in general. For a portfolio, the rule is short: the words that describe the work belong in the page's HTML, next to the pictures they describe.
Where project pages sit on the site
Give each project a page of its own, or at least a headed section of its own on a projects page, and link it from the service page it demonstrates. A kitchen project belongs under kitchens; a flat-roof project under flat roofs. Each service page then links two or three projects as evidence, and each project links back to the service, so a reader who arrives at either finds the other.
Date every project and keep the dates honest. An old project that still shows what you do well can stay up with its date; one that no longer does should come down. A page of recent, dated work tells a reader, and a machine, that the business is doing this now.
Markup, kept to what the page says
The text does the work; markup can repeat it. A project write-up can carry an Article node with its dates and the business as publisher, and each photo an ImageObject with a caption that matches the visible one and a contentLocation naming the town. Use nothing the page does not show; Google's introduction to structured data asks that markup describe the visible content, and promises nothing for it in return.
How to tell whether the write-ups helped
Put two or three questions into your monthly panel that name a job, a material or a place your projects cover, written the way a buyer asks, and read the answers before and after the write-ups go up. Where the answers show their sources, look for your project pages among them. Setting up prompt monitoring describes the panel. And ask new customers what they read before they called; a project page they mention is evidence the page did its job.
Common questions
How many reference projects should we publish?
Enough to show each service you want more of, written up properly, before adding more of the same. One good write-up per service is a better start than twenty captionless photos. Add projects as you finish them, and let the ones that no longer show your work come down.
Can we publish a project without naming the client?
Yes. Describe the client by type and place, a family home in a named neighborhood or a regional business of a named kind, and write the job, the scope, the difficulty and the result in full. Most of what makes a write-up useful is in those facts, not in the client's name.
Do old projects still count?
If they still show what you do, yes, with their dates. A buyer can see from the date whether the work is recent, and a run of dated projects shows a business that has done the job for years. Take down work that no longer represents you, rather than leaving it undated.
Our work is confidential. What can we show?
The shape of it: the kind of problem, the approach, the constraints and what changed, in terms nobody could trace to the client. Quote a client only in words they approved, attributed as they agreed, and never paraphrase a client into a quote. A careful anonymous case is evidence; a claim with nothing behind it is not.
Sources
The audit figures are this site's own, from the article named below, for all 40 trades in it. What schema.org's types carry and what Google asks of markup are linked where they are used.
Sources: our audit of 9,483 small-business sites, with its method · schema.org, Article · schema.org, ImageObject · Google, introduction to structured data
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